British Politics

Crisis deepens for PM as key Brexit ally Lord Frost quits
Departure blamed on No 10 ‘direction’

Caroline Wheeler, Political Editor
Saturday December 18 2021, 10.00pm, The Sunday Times
Brexit

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Lord Frost will leave his post in the new year
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The crisis engulfing Boris Johnson’s premiership deepened last night when an important Brexit ally quit over concerns about a series of core policy decisions.

Lord Frost, who only a year ago celebrated Britain’s departure from the EU with the prime minister, will leave his post immediately. He is understood to have handed his resignation to the prime minister earlier this month, but was persuaded to stay on until January.

It is believed that the prime minister told Frost the government could not cope with a high-profile departure and asked him to delay the announcement. Last night, Frost formally tendered his resignation in a letter expressing concerns about the government’s “direction of travel.”

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Lord Frost’s resignation letter
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Lord Frost wrote: “You know my concerns about the current direction of travel. I hope we will move as fast as possible to where we need to get to: a lightly regulated, low-tax, entrepreneurial economy, at the cutting edge of modern science and economic change.

“Three hundred years of history show that countries which take that route grow and prosper, and I am confident we will too.”

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Frost also expressed his concerns about the Covid-19 crisis after more than 100 Tories MPs rebelled against the government to protest against the introduction of “plan B” measures.

“We also need to learn to live with Covid and I know that is your instinct too,” he wrote. “You took a brave decision in July, against considerable opposition, to open up the country again. Sadly, it did not prove to be irreversible, as I wished, and believe you did too. I hope we can get back on track soon and not be tempted by the kind of coercive measures we have seen elsewhere.”

Allies say Frost is exasperated with the high-spending regime, the obsession with hitting “net zero” environmental targets and Covid vaccine passports. He is also said to be “battle weary” after negotiating with the European Union over the Northern Ireland protocol, the post-Brexit rules that prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Last night Johnson praised Frost for helping to “maximise the economic and political opportunities for Brexit.” The prime minister added in a letter to Frost: “You have helped highlight and sought to address the destabilising impact of the current operation of the Northern Ireland protocol is having on communities in Northern Ireland, which is undermining the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.”



Frost’s departure came at the end of a terrible week for Johnson. There was a damaging backbench rebellion over pandemic regulations, a by-election defeat in a previously safe seat, more revelations about lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street, and a fresh Covid crisis.

Frost dropped a heavy hint of his dissatisfaction with Johnson’s policies in a speech last month. In it, he expressed concern the government was not taking advantage of the freedom given by Brexit to chart a new political course, cutting taxes and reducing regulation.

“We can’t carry on as we were before,” he said. “And if after Brexit all we do is import the European social model, we will not succeed.”

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Lord Frost watched Boris Johnson sign a trade deal with the EU last December
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Before the news of his departure broke, in The Mail on Sunday, it was already understood that Iain Duncan Smith was being lined up for a prominent job to placate the increasingly restive right wing of the Conservative Party.

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It would be part of a wider reset of Johnson’s premiership.

There is no suggestion a leadership challenge will be mounted in the short term but insiders believe the week’s events have left the prime minister “fatally wounded”.

Baroness Chapman of Darlington, Labour’s shadow minister at the Cabinet Office, said: “The government is in chaos. The country needs leadership, not a lame duck PM who has lost the faith of his MPs and cabinet.

“Boris Johnson needs to get a grip, tell us his plan for the next few weeks and bring certainty for the people of Northern Ireland by unblocking the stalemate over the protocol.”

Yesterday the cabinet was in open revolt over coronavirus data from the government’s own scientists and advice to implement pre-Christmas restrictions to combat the spread of the Omicron variant.

Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, briefed the cabinet yesterday that further measures were needed to stop hospital admissions in England reaching 3,000 a day. They believe any delay would allow cases of the new variant to continue doubling every two days, leading to close to a million infections a day by Christmas.

The advice was greeted with scepticism by cabinet ministers who fear the data is not yet reliable enough to justify restrictions that would in effect cancel Christmas.

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The prime minister is understood to be opposed to imminent restrictions and believes the booster vaccination programme should “buy time”. His view was backed by a majority of cabinet ministers.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was one of the most vocal opponents to further restrictions, citing data that showed there had not been a huge rise in deaths in South Africa, where the Omicron variant emerged.

One cabinet minister said: “We can’t have a situation where we lock down every winter and kill off the economy. We need to stop reading across what is happening in South Africa in terms of what is happening here. It is like comparing apples with pears.”

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, is one of those opposed to more restrictions that could damage the economy. This weekend he is considering support including tax breaks for the retail and hospitality sectors after pubs and restaurants said their Christmas bookings had collapsed.

Across the UK, 90,418 new cases were reported yesterday, a slight fall on Friday’s figure but up 67 per cent in a week. It is thought that the number of infections is about twice as high, at closer to 200,000, and may be doubling every two days.

Newly released minutes from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said there could be a peak of 3,000 patients a day needing a hospital bed in England without action, and the longer the delay the more time the NHS would be under significant pressure. Figures show an average of 770 patients admitted per day, a rise of 8 per cent in a week.

The Sage minutes added: “If the aim is to reduce the levels of infection in the population and prevent hospitalisations reaching these levels, more stringent measures would need to be implemented very soon.”

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Johnson’s hopes of relying on the booster programme to avoid new restrictions suffered a blow last night. A leaked NHS email said a national shortage of delivery vehicles could limit jabs being sent out next week.

It came as Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, declared a major incident over the “huge surge” of Omicron cases in the capital, where there is a high number of unvaccinated people. The number of Covid-19 patients in London hospitals has gone up 29 per cent in a week.

It is understood that any further restrictions could be introduced between Christmas and the new year. Boxing Day has been pencilled in for an announcement, with the measures potentially starting on December 27.

One of the options being considered is understood to be a two-week circuit breaker, involving a return of the rule of six and no indoor mixing. Pubs and restaurants would only be allowed to serve customers outside.

However, the plans have yet to reach ministerial level and have not been signed off.

It is also understood that Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has not ruled out demanding fresh curbs.

The Liberal Democrats have called on the government to recall a virtual parliament over Covid policy.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, has requested a meeting with the clerk of the House of Commons and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House, to discuss whether MPs can return to parliament in the new year, perhaps remotely.



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The things that the crazed lefties will never appreciate is the collective strength of Tory unity and purpose and the unquestionable and solid morality and values that is intrinsic to Tory DNA ...

 

Is this the "me too" campaign? ... if so count me in ...

 

PAUL MASON
Boris Johnson is being consumed by the forces of a new Conservative ideology
The Tory party does not have the will or interest to put the common good before the doctrine of selfishness.

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Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck
Last night, on 14 December, 96 Tory MPs voted to defeat a deadly disease with an ideology. In defence of the right of boozed-up people to spread Covid-19 across the club dancefloors of England, they publicly destroyed Boris Johnson’s credibility as Prime Minister.






In the worst-case scenario, Johnson loses the North Shropshire by-election on 16 December, the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case finds evidence that the No 10 Christmas parties last year broke the law and hands the case over to the Metropolitan Police, and Christopher Geidt, the standards adviser who investigated Johnson’s flat refurbishment, resigns – presumably claiming that Johnson lied to parliament, which would itself be a resignation issue for the PM.

But even the best-case scenario for Johnson does not look good. Last night showed that – in the middle of the gravest public health crisis for a century – the Conservative Party does not have the will or interest to put the common good over the ideology of selfishness that galvanises them each day.

The arguments of the rebel Tory MPs simply echoed the mythologies that the plebeian far-right has been propagating for months: that vaccines don’t stop the disease spreading; that – for 40 hardcore Tory individualists such as Esther McVey and Scott Benton – neither do masks; that restrictions on the right to spread the disease are akin to Nazism; that “the economy” must come before the health and wellbeing of elderly, disabled and vulnerable people – as if the economy itself were made up of bank accounts and company registration certificates, not humans.

The instinctive Tory opposition to lockdowns, and the embrace of “herd immunity” as the sole strategy to contain Covid-19, flows from three conceits that have become core to conservative ideology.

The first – originally espoused by Johnson himself in his February 2020 Greenwich speech – is that Brexit makes Britain invincible. Nothing, even a global pandemic, can prevent our meteoric return to greatness. Though Johnson was quickly disabused of this idea, by Dominic Cummings among others, it remains the loudly spoken assumption of many right-wing conservatives. The success of the vaccination programme (touted by xenophobes as only possible because of Brexit) lulled large parts of conservative England into thinking there could be, and would be, no more restrictions on movement, behaviour or work.

The second conceit is that economic austerity remains possible and desirable, even in the face of a major crisis such as the pandemic. With the UK’s debt at over £2trn, and still needing to deliver billions in electoral bribes to northern English towns as part of the “levelling up” agenda, any further furloughs, or Universal Credit hikes, or improvements in sick pay have been ruled immoral in the Tory mind. There must be spending cuts and tax rises in short order, and no further hits to economic growth caused by working from home.

Thirdly, in the face of the greatest peacetime mobilisation of public resources, and concomitant restrictions on civil liberties, conservatism persists in demanding that the state be small and unintrusive. These are not consistent libertarians: the MPs who rebelled on 14 December have already voted enthusiastically to criminalise asylum seekers, shipping them to detention camps in a “safe third state” (reportedly Albania), and to force Britain’s electorate to carry compulsory ID on polling day.

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They are, however, consistent libertarians on their own behalf. Rules that apply to others shall not apply to them. That’s why, last year, when law-abiding people were stuck in their own homes, forbidden to associate in any way, numerous groups of entitled Tories held illegal Christmas parties, took photos, and joked about how to lie their way out of it.

Unfortunately, none of these attitudes is the preserve of a few MPs, advisers and hedge fund groupies. They are widely held by a minority of British society, and underpinned by a deep psychological fear.

The most succinct summation of that fear was displayed by their counterparts in Austria last month, when 40,000 right-wing voters paraded through Vienna behind a banner saying: “Control your borders, not your people.”

Modern right-wing populists want an authoritarian state, but always aimed at someone else: the refugee in the dinghy, the Pakistani postal voter, the Extinction Rebellion protester, the criminal whose father came from Jamaica. It is the “other” who must have their rights curtailed, their dignity smashed, their image besmirched by stereotypes.

There are those from whom having their own rights reduced is anathema. They will vote for anyone who promises to cut public spending, but gladly join the queue at the local A&E with a sprained ankle, loudly complaining about the nationalities of the people in front of them.

So the Tory rebellion was not manufactured in the tearooms of Westminster. It is a real expression of the radicalised political force that has been driving politics in England since at least 2014: selfish, nationalist individualism. It has grasped – and squeezed to death – three Conservative prime ministers in a row, and shows no sign of remitting.

David Cameron realised he was sitting on a time bomb of resentment – not just against the European Union but human rights law – and he tried to defuse Brexit both with a referendum and a promise to scrap the Human Rights Act. Theresa May thought she could assuage the mass Tory desire for self-destruction by delivering Brexit and doubling down on austerity. She too was sacrificed.

And now it’s Johnson’s turn. The tragedy for the mass base of right-wing populism is that they never get to choose who leads them. Johnson chose them, not the other way around. And he’s not really one of them. While they are happy to receive a billion here and there for the local bus station, thanks to Johnson’s breezy approach to public finance, they cannot reconcile themselves to governance by scientific advice.

So they must soon choose someone else. But it won’t be easy. Because beyond Johnson there are very few people in Tory politics malleable enough to embody all the prejudices of the mass base in the pursuit of power.

Sunak wants a small state; Patel wants migrants in detention camps; David Frost wants to renege on the Brexit deal; Liz Truss wants a rerun of Thatcherism; Raab wants to exit the European Convention on Human Rights. Fine: these are the fantasies that haunt conservative minds.

[See also: Scrapping our human rights is Brexit 2.0 for Raab and Johnson]

But no prime minister can avoid the truth: ideologies don’t defeat viruses. Johnson, for all his sloth and gluttony, learned this on the job and in the hardest way possible: by almost dying from it.

If Johnson is replaced in short order, whoever takes over will have the same problem: they will be reliant on Labour votes to maintain a semblance of competent governance on the most pressing threat to our security and safety.

Keir Starmer was right to back Johnson unconditionally. We don’t know, at this moment, whether we’ll be dealing with a stressed NHS in January or, in the vulnerable rural and coastal areas, a collapsing one. Starmer erred on the side of caution, even reversing Labour’s principled aversion to compulsory vaccination for NHS staff, and facing down union pressure.

The rationale was clearly put by new shadow health secretary Wes Streeting: if tens of thousands of NHS staff test positive for Covid-19 between now and spring, you can kiss the A&E system goodbye, no matter how severe or mild the Omicron variant turns out to be.

So we approach the Christmas break as we entered the last one: with a government in self-inflicted crisis. The basic problem with modern conservatism is that, chemically speaking, it’s more like a suspension than a solution. Its constituent particles – libertarianism, xenophobia and austerity – do not merge easily into an organic whole. Unless the vessel is repeatedly shaken, the elements tend to separate over time.

For two years Johnson held it all together. But he no longer can.

 

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Steven Pinker interview: Why humans aren't as irrational as they seem
To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

HUMANS 8 December 2021
By Graham Lawton

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Jennie Edwards

HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.

Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens as a species stuck in the past, with an ancient brain fuelled by biases, fallacies and illusions, incapable of understanding the complexities of the modern world.

History, he argues, refutes that. After all, humans have built civilisations, discovered the laws of nature, vanquished diseases and identified the building blocks of rationality itself. Ours isn’t an innately irrational species, says Pinker. However, we don’t embrace our rational side as much as we might. With more insight into the human mind, we can learn to change that – and master an underused resource that will help us tackle the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.


New Scientist: What do you mean by rationality?

Steven Pinker: I define it as the use of knowledge to attain goals. There is not one single tool of rationality – it depends what you’re after. If you’re seeking to derive new true statements from existing ones, then logic is your tool. If you want to assess your degree of belief in a hypothesis based on evidence, then Bayesian reasoning. If you want to figure out what’s the rational thing to do when the outcome depends on what other rational people do, game theory.

Those tools don’t seem to come naturally to people, yet you reject the idea that human cognition is a heffalump trap of biases and delusions that are a legacy of our evolution. Why?


Yeah, I don’t think it’s quite right. Although there’s no question we do have outbursts of irrationality – and they are all too plentiful – I’m not ready to write off our species as irrational. We can all be rational when it comes to our immediate surroundings and outcomes that affect our lives. And if you’re upset about some outbursts of irrationality, don’t blame hunter-gatherers. I begin the book with a description of how the San people of the Kalahari desert deploy rationality to engage in pursuit hunting, where they’ve got to figure out where the antelope may have run based on some fragmentary tracks on the ground. They engage in some pretty sophisticated inference. They wouldn’t survive if they didn’t.

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The San people of the Kalahari use rationality for pursuit hunting

Karin Duthie/Alamy



All of us command some aspect of rationality. In our everyday lives we package it with subject-matter knowledge in particular areas – bringing up the kids, holding down a job, getting food in the fridge. What we don’t wield are tools that can be applied to any subject matter: calculating probability, distinguishing correlation from causation, Bayesian reasoning, statistical decision theory. Those come less naturally to us. And when it comes to issues that are larger than our day-to-day physical existence, people don’t necessarily hew to the mindset that ideas should be evaluated as to whether they’re true or false.

You also claim that some seeming irrationality can be understood as the rational pursuit of goals. How so?

Rationality always has to be defined with respect to a goal. What are you deploying your thought processes to attain? The goals sometimes can be dubious, but you can be extremely methodical at attaining them. I cite the defenders of Donald Trump against accusations of irrationality, who will say: Well, he got to be president, didn’t he? If the goal is glorifying Donald Trump, rallying his supporters and gaining the levers of power, he was quite a genius at it. From the point of view of his own rationality, there was a certain cunning.

But surely the current “pandemic of poppycock”, as you call it, is something new?

Conspiracy theories are probably as old as human groups. Paranormal woo isn’t new. Neither is fake news. These are maybe the default mode of our species. For most of human history, it was hard to tell what was true or false. What is the origin of fortune and misfortune? What is the origin of the universe? What actually happens behind closed doors in palaces and halls of power? You can’t find out. But there are some beliefs that will rally your coalition together – that are uplifting, that are morally edifying, that are entertaining – and those stories for most of our history were as close as we could get to the truth, and they served as a substitute for the truth.

What’s unusual now is that we have a lot of means to answer questions that formerly were just cosmic mysteries. Before that, it was a matter of conjecture. And a good story was the best we could do. We carry over that mindset when it comes to the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical, the highly politicised.

You describe key mechanisms through which people form irrational beliefs – the three M’s of motivated reasoning, myside bias and mythological belief. Can you unpack them one at a time?

Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon where we direct our reasoning toward something that we want to believe in the first place. There is a saying from the [late] American journalist Upton Sinclair that it’s very hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it. In the lab, we see this manifested when you give people a logical syllogism [two statements with a logical conclusion] and ask them if the conclusion follows from the premises. If the conclusion is something that they want to be true, they are apt to ratify an invalid syllogism – and vice versa if it is a conclusion that they don’t want to be true.

And myside bias?

Motivated reasoning can be in the service not just of a goal that favours the individual, but often the larger coalition that he or she belongs to, in which case it’s called the myside bias. Namely, you direct your reasoning to end up with a conclusion that is already a belief in your team, your coalition, your party. It’s among the most powerful of the many cognitive biases that have been documented by cognitive psychology. It afflicts the [political] left and the right. Being smart does not make you immune to it. And it’s rather hard to unlearn.

There is a variety of ways in which we comfort ourselves in thinking that beliefs of our side are valid and wise. We muster our ingenuity, we take advantage of ambiguities in the evidence, we feed ourselves evidence that supports our position and try to ignore sources that might contradict our preferred beliefs. We think more like lawyers than scientists.

What are some real-world manifestations of myside bias?

With politicised issues in science such as anthropogenic climate change, scientists are often surprised that there is so much denial. They sometimes attribute it to scientific ignorance or illiteracy. But that is a less-than-rational belief because it’s not based on empirical studies of why people deny climate change. What those studies show is that the deniers are actually no more ignorant of science than the believers. In fact, a lot of people who endorse the scientific consensus are really out to lunch when it comes to the science of climate change. They think it has something to do with the ozone hole, toxic waste dumps, plastic straws in the ocean. What does predict people’s belief in climate change is their politics. The farther you are to the right, the more denial there is.

That’s a case in which the scientifically respectable conclusion is aligned with the left. But there are also cases where the left is out of touch with the scientific facts.

My claim that left and right are equally biased is not just an attempt to be even-handed. Research on the myside bias shows that both the left and the right are susceptible. A given set of data – say on the efficacy of gun control – will be seen to support or not support a position depending on whether the reasoner belongs to a side that believes it in the first place.

And then we get to the third and most potent M, which is mythological belief.

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An anti-vaccination protest in London, earlier this year

Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/Shutterstock



I think this a powerful explanation for why people apparently believe so much nonsense. There are real beliefs like “I believe there is a beer in the fridge”. But then there’s a whole family of beliefs that are more like stories that capture a deeper truth: what our enemies are capable of and how dreadful they are; how noble our side is, how wise and pure and good. Whether these things are true is almost beside the point. These are mythological beliefs.

Some of our national founding myths may fall into that category. Some religious beliefs too, and believers are sometimes offended by the idea that they should be subject to empirical scrutiny. For them, belief in God is a kind of belief you hold for its moral benefits, not for its factual accuracy. It’s a different kind of belief.

I quote Bertrand Russell, who said it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for believing it is true. And what I note is that this is at odds with the way that most people think. It’s a product of the Enlightenment that we think that every question ought to be put in the realm of reality and tested for its literal veracity.

That seems to imply that some beliefs are beyond criticism and impervious to evidence. Is that right?

There is a tendency to protect these beliefs or at least to take them out of the realm of evidence, but the boundary between the real and the mythical can be changed. The origin of fortune and misfortune may once have been attributed to fate, but we now consider it an empirical question. We want to know what gives you Alzheimer’s. It’s not divine retribution.

I think the general tendency since the Enlightenment has been to try to bite off chunks of the mythology zone for the reality zone. I say the more the better, and in particular areas, we can try to persuade people that, no, you can’t just believe anything you want. There really is a fact of the matter.

Can that boundary between reality and mythology shift in real time, say with something like covid-19 that starts as an abstract threat, but then becomes horribly real?

You would think that vaccine hesitancy would crumble in the face of covid. It has not, although it has declined. What I suspect happens is that with any mythological belief, there are the true believers who will go to their graves believing, no matter how high the evidence piles up. But there are always some who are more open to the evidence.

Yet it seems that the mythological zone is expanding right now, at least in Western democracies. Is it?

It’s all too easy to come to a conclusion based on our own availability biases, and on an understanding of the world from anecdotes, which is basically what journalism consists of. Unfortunately, we don’t have the good evidence over an extended period that would settle it. I cite a study that looked for conspiratorial content in letters to the editors of major American newspapers over a span of more than a century and found no increase. The data I found on belief in paranormal phenomena among Americans – astrology, crystal power, haunted houses – is pretty much flat over 50 years, too.

“Conspiracy theories, paranormal views and fake news are not new – they may be the default mode of our species”

So humanity isn’t losing its mind today any more than it has in the past?

No. But we are squandering some of the tools that could make us more rational if they were more widely applied. It’s not that people are saying more unfounded or outlandish things, but we’re more cognisant of the higher standards that we ought to apply, and so the lapses are all the more salient to us. In terms of the moral statement of what we ought to do, it’s now accepted that we ought to prioritise rationality.

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Seven ways to build a more rational world
Rational thinking requires mental tools that don’t come naturally. We have an intuitive sense of them, says psychologist Steven Pinker, but to improve our grasp, schools should teach logic and critical thinking, and replace outdated subjects like trigonometry with probability and statistics.

People should also be made aware of the many cognitive biases that influence our thinking. “We are all victims of bias,” says Pinker. “But self-awareness of that means that we can interrogate our own unexamined biases.”

We should seek to belong to communities in which the overarching goal is objective truth. The aim here is to submit to the pains of peer review, of having your ideas challenged and of having to defend your beliefs.

Resisting irrationality isn’t simply down to individuals, it also rests on social institutions with norms and rules that allow us to be collectively more rational. Functioning democracy, rigorous journalism and depoliticised universities are three cornerstones.

Our legislatures are often dominated by lawyers whose professional goal is victory rather than truth. If there were more scientists in politics, they could try to spread the value of evidence-based problem-solving among their colleagues, says Pinker.

“But there’s a danger of scientists presenting themselves as a kind of priesthood,” he adds. When debates are shut down and holders of unpopular beliefs cancelled, that sends the wrong message. Science must show that it is an arena where truths can emerge.

Finally, we can all help make rationality a social norm. By deriding irrational thinking and championing behaviours such as acknowledging uncertainty, questioning dogmas and changing our minds when the facts change, rationality becomes cool.